Ginni Thomas Was in Contact With John Eastman as He Pushed to Overturn Election

WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has received emails that show Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was in contact with the conservative lawyer John Eastman as he pushed to overturn the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the panel’s work.

The emails show Ms. Thomas, who had advocated widely for conservatives to fight the results of the election, expressed those views to Mr. Eastman, according to one person familiar with the messages. The existence of the emails was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

While it was not immediately clear when the emails involving Ms. Thomas were sent, a federal judge recently ordered Mr. Eastman to turn over additional documents to the panel from the period after the November election when he was meeting with conservative groups to discuss fighting the election results.

The committee received the emails as it prepares on Thursday to present new details of the intense pressure campaign President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Eastman waged against Vice President Mike Pence, which the panel says directly contributed to the violent siege of Congress.

The public hearing, the panel’s third this month as it lays out the steps Mr. Trump took to try to overturn the 2020 election, is scheduled for 1 p.m. The committee plans to release materials detailing the threats of violence against Mr. Pence, and the ways the vice president’s security team scrambled to try to keep him safe from the mob.

The hearing is set to feature testimony from J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge who advised Mr. Pence that Mr. Trump’s push for the vice president to unilaterally decide to invalidate election results was unconstitutional, and that he should not go along with the plan.

Also scheduled to appear is Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s top White House lawyer, who has provided the committee with crucial evidence about the role played by Mr. Eastman, who wrote a memo that members of both parties have described as a blueprint for a coup.

Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California and a member of the panel, is expected to lead a presentation of the evidence. A committee senior investigative counsel, John Wood, whom President George W. Bush hired as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, is expected to conduct some of the questioning of witnesses.

The committee is also expected to play video from an interview it recorded with Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short. A day before the mob violence, Mr. Short grew so concerned about Mr. Trump’s actions that he presented a warning to a Secret Service agent: The president was going to publicly turn against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.

The committee is not expected to display any of the new emails it received involving Ms. Thomas on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the presentation.

Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, is a right-wing political activist who became a close ally of Mr. Trump during his presidency. After he lost the election, she sent a series of messages to Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, Arizona lawmakers and others pushing for the election to be overturned.

In one of her texts to Mr. Meadows, she said to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a web of conspiracy theories that Trump supporters believed would overturn the election.

“Do your constitutional duty,” Ms. Thomas wrote to Arizona lawmakers on Nov. 9. On Dec. 13, with Mr. Trump still refusing to concede on the eve of the Electoral College vote, she contacted the lawmakers again.

After debating internally about whether to seek an interview with Ms. Thomas, members of the committee have said in recent weeks that they do not see her actions as central to the plans to overturn the election.

Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, this weekend told NBC that Ms. Thomas was “not the focus of this investigation.”

But her contact with Mr. Eastman, who was her husband’s former law clerk, is likely to raise new questions for the panel. Mr. Eastman was central to effort to the overturn the 2020 election and put pressure on Mr. Pence.

A federal judge has already concluded in a civil case that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had “more likely than not” committed two felonies, including conspiracy to defraud the American people, in their attempts to overturn the election.

The Jan. 6 committee has been presenting the televised hearings as a series of movie-length chapters laying out the different ways Mr. Trump tried to cling to power. After an initial prime-time hearing that drew more than 20 million viewers, in which the panel sought to establish that the former president was at the center of the plot, investigators focused their second hearing on how Mr. Trump spread the lie of a stolen election.

Future hearings are expected to focus on how Mr. Trump and his allies pressured state officials to overturn the election; attempted to interfere with the Justice Department; created slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.; and amassed a mob that marched on the Capitol, while the president did nothing to stop the violence for 187 minutes.

Through the hearings, the committee is drawing upon the more than 1,000 interviews it conducted and the more than 140,000 documents it obtained.

The committee is expected to detail on Thursday some of its findings about the plot involving pro-Trump electors. The panel will present evidence that the White House counsel also concluded that the vice president had no legal power to throw out legitimate electoral votes for the fake electors Mr. Trump’s team put forward.

Investigators will show how Mr. Trump was advised that his plans were unlawful but he pressed forward with them anyway, committee aides said.

The panel also plans to demonstrate that the threat to American democracy is ongoing, committee aides said.

To build public anticipation, the committee has begun releasing teaser clips to preview its hearings. On Tuesday, the panel released a clip of Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, telling Mr. Eastman the day after the Capitol riot that he believed Mr. Eastman had committed a crime.

“I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life,” Mr. Herschmann recalls telling Mr. Eastman before recommending that he find a criminal defense lawyer, and adding, “You’re going to need it.”

Mr. Jacob has provided the committee with important evidence about Mr. Eastman’s role in the events that led to the attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Eastman conceded during an email exchange with Mr. Jacob that his plan to overturn the election was in “violation” of federal law.

As the mob attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 — some of its members chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” — Mr. Jacob sent an email to Mr. Eastman blaming him for the violence.

“Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege,” Mr. Jacob wrote that day at 12:14 p.m.

“It was gravely, gravely irresponsible for you to entice the president with an academic theory that had no legal viability,” Mr. Jacob wrote in a subsequent email to Mr. Eastman.

The committee could also hear testimony about Mr. Trump’s state of mind during the violence.

Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, said last week that the panel had received testimony that when Mr. Trump learned of the mob’s threats to hang Mr. Pence, he said, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” and added that Mr. Pence “deserves it.”

The committee has scheduled two more hearings, for June 21 and June 23, at 1 p.m.